


Greedy Ducks

by TycoonTwister



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Aziraphale finally figuring out things, Crowley Being a Mess, Fluff, M/M, Pining, love letter, since this is a good omens fic ducks play an important part, so much pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 17:15:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19728169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TycoonTwister/pseuds/TycoonTwister
Summary: The day before the scheduled end of the world, Crowley wrote a email confessing his pain, his fear, and above all, his love.That was never meant to be sent. That was never meant to be read.Three days later, 'cause karma sucks and it sucks particularly hard when you're a demon, Aziraphale checks his email for the first time in years.





	Greedy Ducks

**Author's Note:**

> A note: I know in the book!verse Zira actually uses his computer, but I actually discovered that bit of information after writing this and the entire story follows the show!canon anyway so… I beg your forgiveness. I’m messy and emotional and not good at the presenting-your-stories thing.

Aziraphale remembered the computer when he was one step from leaving the bookshop – hand on the door handle, faithful umbrella tucked under his arm, the promise of a reserved table and a luxurious feast of sushi already gleaming gold in his evening plans. 

He had spent the whole afternoon wandering about the newly-restored rooms of his shop, tapping at leather armchairs and stacks of carefully plastic-wrapped magazines and racks of humorous – _humorous, no matter what Crowley had to say about it_ – angel-themed tea mugs; reassuring himself everything was indeed how it was supposed to be. He had examined his backroom, with its methodical chaos of reference volumes and boxes of surgical rubber gloves, the stairs swirling up to his little croissant-colored apartment – even the complete collection of Romantic Poetry tucked away in its shadowed corner by the bow window. 

During Aziraphale’s long years of pleasant acquaintance with cat-loving poets and intellectuals equipped with feline company in variable number, he had often marveled at the way those creatures took charge of a new home after a move: the cautiousness of it, the profound contentedness when they finally felt settled down enough to curl up on a sofa, scratch their nails a bit down the embroidery, and go to sleep. 

Charming creatures, cats. Sensible. Shockingly relatable, too. 

When Crowley had driven him up to the noisy throng of tourists shuffling past his bookshop and Aziraphale realized it was still there, _all of it still there_ , he had felt his knees go weak with relief. He had been grateful. He had been positively overjoyed. It was actually rather more complicated than that, because by then he had already started toying with silly concepts of a cold, clean-cut flat tempered by a couple of his best Victorian coffee tables, books mixed with potted plants, photos peppering walls and spanning wildly from digital candid shots to coffee-hued daguerreotypes and morphing smoothly into tasteful little paintings in gold leaf and oil colors; the same two men showing up in each of them, against sand-whipped Egyptian landscapes and courtly stone halls. 

But – there was no need for that anymore, of course. He had his bookshop. He had his flat, the well-ordered life that came with it. And the ideas of mixed books and photos, the man implied in those ideas, would be the farthest thing he can think of from a well-ordered life. 

Aziraphale was a creature of habit, which is really a drag when you're an angel, and therefore a creature supposed to be acutely aware of the transience of everything material. He reckoned it wasn’t going to be as serious a matter as before, before, now that Above and Below alike had discreetly decided to leave them alone. Now that they were _free_. 

(The word had gone through Aziraphale like electricity zapping up his spine – spearing him to the bench they had been sitting on, the rbus headlights flashing rheumily as it lurched down the road towards their stop. _Free_. He had felt the swoop in his stomach, a sensation like falling and falling with no ground in sight. 

For a moment, he has been so completely, ruthlessly scared he had had to grab at the edge of the bench to keep himself together, manicured nails digging into the peeling paint. Then Crowley had called his name, and he was leaning closer, eyes yellow and wide and a trifle lost beyond those ridiculous shades of his, and just like that, Aziraphale had stopped falling. Started gliding, more like. Angels are manufactured to overcome gravity, after all.) 

He feels it again now, that pulse rippling up his spine: a pricking that made his fingers falls off the handle, his head twist towards the back of his shop. In a puddle of neglected darkness, under a small avalanche of Post-it notes bleached by time, something squarish and bulky chirruped sadly in the silence. Blinked green lights at him. 

_Oh – oh dear._

After months since his last epiphany, and with ever-fresh shock, Aziraphale remembered that he did, in fact, owned a computer. 

And one that, despite the scorching inferno that had liquefied his circuitry less than two days ago, was still alive, and signaling desperately for him to check on it. 

_The poor thing,_ Aziraphale mused. He rested his umbrella against the wall, picking his way back to the miserable twinkling lights. _So loyal. And I probably nearly killed it. Multiple times._

To be perfectly fair, the computed had never been his idea. Aziraphale was enamored with many of marvelous things the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first had produced – milkshakes for example; _especially_ milkshakes – but he'd always engaged with high-tech gear the way anthropologists did with unknown cultures: polite and appreciative, but trying not get directly involved with any of it. 

On a prodigiously rainy morning nearly thirty years ago, though, Crowley had clambered in with a bundle of plastic and black garbage bags in his arms, cables dangling under it like horrible technological innards, dumped the thing on one of Aziraphale's worktables, and told him to take half an hour from his luxuriant angelic eternity to learn the ropes of the blessed thing. 

_Is that – is that for me? Oh, Crowley, you. You shouldn't have-_

_Spare me, angel. You hate it. I_ know _you hate it – you're doing that little half-tilt of the head and the pursed-lippy face you do when you're angry but don't want people to see it. But it's not a gift for you. It's for_ me _._

_Huh?_

_I want to send you e-mails, angel – everybody ends e-mails these days. And in order to do so, you need a computer. You're clever. You'll manage._

_E-mails?_ Aziraphale had thought fondly of his beautiful Bakelite wall phone, the desk White Phone he had cherished since the Italians made them all the rage with their 1930s movies. _What's wrong with good old phones?_

_Nothing – but e-mail are the new way to go. And probably even safer from… outside intrusions than phone calls._ Crowley had made a vague gesture with his hand, encompassing both the stormy sky outside the window and the floor under their feet. He had started unsheathing the computer, with the impatient, strangely effective ease he had with technology. A square black screen peeked from its bubblewrap, followed by something like a typewriter in ugly gray plastic. _Besides – with these things you need to_ write _, just like in the old days. You'll love it. You spent two decades complaining about the end of letter-writing._

Regrettably, Aziraphale hadn't found anything to object to that. He remembered with painfully clarity the endless string of afternoons and nights he had forced Crowley to spend at cafes during the War, prattling on and on about the loss of romanticism in this age of instant communication and barked phone calls, sometimes not even slowing down as they heard the call of air-raid sirens and descended into the refuges along with every other surly Londoner, and the stoic grace with which Crowley had endured it all. He supposed he owned him. 

And then – well, Aziraphale had felt on edge that day: his comfortable, golden solitude tipping into something lightless and stagnant. Crowley shoving him into a chair in front of the computer and climbing awkwardly on the edge of the desk had felt better, miles better than it. 

Crowley patiently teaching him how to use the ugly electronic typewriter – as Aziraphale had, rather uncharitably, instantly dubbed it – murmuring encouragements when deserved, leaning in close enough for Aziraphale to smell the coal and wet leather of him – it had felt not only good, but right. Heavens, it had felt perfectly, completely _right_. 

By the time Crowley had left that night – chaperoning Aziraphale to his favorite ice cream parlor for a decadent concoction with whipped cream and meringue – Aziraphale's life had once again felt golden and comfortable, his heart had been beating a little harder than strictly necessary, and he had found himself with a chirping, ill-shaped electric box he understood the function of only in the broadest of terms. He had kept it, in memory of that afternoon and the subtle magic Crowley had been capable of; occasionally used it to answer his friend's messages, until the late Nineties mailing mania passed and Crowley jumped hungrily on the mobile phones bandwagon, catching the whiff of both a new source of entertainment and a good professional move. Then, Aziraphale had promptly forgot about it. 

Angels are creature of light, therefore of matter and waves, therefore of energy; he supposed some of it must have seeped into the machine's fatigued circuits. There is no other way it could have kept working for so long. Especially with its plug pulled off to make room for the kettle. _Ops._

Aziraphale gingerly set down to clean out the concretion of knickknacks smothering the computer, feeling more than a little guilty about the whole affair. He exhumed several curly-edged issues of the _Paris Review_ , and flicked his fingers in a frisson of a miracle to wipe away the fur of old dust fogging the screen. He awkwardly patted the monitor, in silent apology. 

The computer didn’t seem to be the resentful type. It chirped and hummed under his touch; free of the dimness of dust, the green light blinked brighter. Aziraphale felt a random bit of Crowley's instruction ricochet around his mind, and realized the green light means the e-mail service was still active. And that it had a message for him. 

Which, considering none of his human acquaintances would be foolish enough to try and send him anything more modern than a telegram, made absolutely no sense. 

Slowly, very slowly, Aziraphale slid into the swivel chair by the desk – gracefully disappearing the address book of restaurants dumped on it. 

He tentatively tapped at the right keys; watched the screen flash up in a splash of dull blue, icons flickering to life against it. The computer groaned hard enough to make the desk edge under Aziraphale's elbows shake with it, oozing the tang of burned plastic and something like overcooked grease, but it valiantly trudged on, and half a minute later Aziraphale saw the white bubble pulsing nervously on the edge of the screen _._

_You have 1 new message_ . 

Suddenly, without warning, Aziraphale felt something go off and swell in his chest – like a match struck right under his breastbone, suddenly making light. He let it flow through him, flooding veins and neurons and bones, banning dark corners for one long, brilliant heartbeat. The sensation was well-known to any member of the angelfolk; sometimes warning, sometimes foreboding, a spark of divine clairvoyance. The timing, though, made him suck in a breath through his teeth – because the match usually didn’t get struck if not in the presence of great viciousness, or of an equally vast love. 

This should be neither. Could be both. 

Aziraphale swallowed. Brushed at the keys. He willed himself to be brave, and tapped the bubble open. 

The screen filled with a web of text, rows of forgotten names and bold-lettered warnings and the enthusiastic if jarring offers of what Crowley once called spam, atherosclerotic with oldness. At the top of the page, though – a new message indeed. With Crowley's name as the sender. And the date of three days ago. 

One day before the scheduled End of Times. 

The light fluttering under Aziraphale's skin flared up, humming like trapped wings. 

He squinted at the screen. There was no subject indicated. Typical Crowley: no clues offered beforehand, no warnings to brace with. Still, it was probably nothing urgent, not anymore. They had more or less saved the world – or at least successfully managed not to blow it up and to keep themselves alive in the process. They were all right. They were – free. He could well leave the mail alone, plunge his computer into another ten-year-long hibernation, and still be at The Golden Crane by seven thirty. 

Aziraphale bit his lip, hard enough for a pulse of pain to rattle through his nerves. Felt the edges of the screen with one hand. Thought of the safe way of doing things, the well-ordered way, and the walls of it closing on him inch by inch. 

Thought, _oh, the_ hell _with it,_ and clicked the mail open. 

No header either, of course. All lowercase; Crowley's messy scrawl of a penmanship somehow showing even through standardized computer font. Aziraphale repressed a pained grimace. Let his gaze skim over the first lines. 

_Angel. My angel. Aziraphale._

_First things first – I'm a coward, angel. That may not come as an enormous surprise – I'm pretty sure the Above propaganda holds firm all demons are vile and groveling and spineless by contract, so to speak – but it has to be said. If I weren't such a coward, I wouldn't be writing you an e-mail – which I'm absolutely sure is not going to be read or even noticed whether the whole blessed world is going to be slurped down by the kraken or not._

_I've seen the state you're leaving your computer in, angel; you should just off the poor thing and throw it away. I'm not big on the wanton abuse of vintage technology._

_Still. I'm writing this e-mail because there are things I need to tell you, and that I need you not to read, and that's the best way to do it I could come up with. A wile, of sort. Not sure who I'm wiling here, though, if you or myself or both._

_But know this: this, this thing I’m hurling into the ether never to be found again, is the truth. The honest, bare, pathetic truth of A.J.Crowley, failed wiler._

_The fact is, angel –_

Aziraphale read on. 

Minutes squeakily lurched on. Aziraphale grew very, very still. The room, the bookshop, the whole London, with its boisterous thumping heart and grimy chaos, grew deeply, perfectly silent. At the center of it, Aziraphale held his breath – eyes snagged on the screen. 

_Oh_ , he thought, so loud in the silence it felt like thunder pouring out of his bones. _Oh_. 

(For the second in two days, Aziraphale's well-mannered heart got dislodged – floating under off ribs, unbound. It might be sprouting wings. 

It might be falling.) 

*** 

Crowley wasn’t worried. This is the first thing you have to understand – he was not. Crowley didn’t _do_ worry. 

True, Aziraphale was supposed to be there – at their park, at their bench – twenty minutes ago, according to the overly-technological waterproof watch strapped to his wrist. The gourmet food truck the angel had been dying to try before the Almost-Armageddon was going to be packed with hipsters in less than half an hour, which would keep Aziraphale from spending his customary twenty minutes asking painstakingly precise questions to the cooks before ending up ordering half the menu anyway. But there wasn’t anything to be worried about. There _wasn’t_. The angel could look after himself, no matter what his layers of broadcloth and perverse passion for double-decker buses might suggest; and it wasn't the first time Crowley had to wait for him. 

Bookshops and books tended to suck in Aziraphale and cough him out hours later, bedraggled and completely disoriented. Always had. During the whole Alexandria fiasco, Crowley had had to physically pry the angel off the library shelves, one rose-water-smelling finger at a time, and they still very nearly got turned into well-grilled immortal kebabs. 

(One of the things that had driven Crowley absolutely rabid about the fourteenth century was its medieval messy concept of time. Crowley had always hated tardiness; turned a couple of people into frogs because of it, too. 

The angel was chronically late, a dashing-into-the-room-all-flushed-and-with-papers-still-trailing-after-him type. Crowley had never been even briefly visited by the idea of turning _him_ into a frog. He was painfully aware of the reason he wasn’t. He was not going to discuss it with his head, not right now, not when the mere prodding at the edges of the thought made it nearly impossible to breathe.) 

So, yes – twenty minutes and no sign of the angel was no big deal at all. And anyway this – this was not the kind of date people are supposed or feel obliged to show up in perfect time for, a bit breathless maybe, scrubbed clean and carefully trimmed and in fine clothes they have agonized over for half an hour in frenzied despair. No the kind where you would, say, show up half an hour early out of sheer nerves. 

(It was a pure coincidence that was exactly what had happened that morning – had simply been around the neighborhood on other business, and figured it was stupid to go home and subject the Bentley and himself to the torture of midday London traffic for no good reason. Pure sensible demonic selfishness, see?) 

This was just friends meeting for a friendily friendly luncheon: complimenting each other on still being able to enjoy it, after all that had nearly happened. And it wasn’t something to shrug off easily. It was a _lot_. It was much more than Crowley had hoped for when he drank himself stupid crying about whales and dolphins, when he walked into a burning bookshop and the world reduced to the glaring lack of angel inside it. It was something he would be grateful for, if he were still a creature built for gratefulness ( _he was; he would always be_ ). 

It was, most definitely, much more than he deserved. And that's why he wouldn’t mess it up. That's why he wouldn’t run too fast. Not ever again. 

Crowley checked his watch. He caught a glimpse of pale clothes and blond hair and nearly jumped to his feet, only to deflate as he looked at the line of the stranger’s shoulder, and knows it was not _him_. 

A sigh. _You utter twat_. He plucked the sunglasses off his nose, rubbed at his eyes until they fulled with pulsing stars, in self-retaliation. _You old wanker._

The shades slid back in place. Crowley rummaged into his pockets – folded into a couple of extra dimensions, which is handy to hide stuff but perfidiously bothersome when you're looking for something specific and can't remember the exact astral plane you stuffed it in – in search of an extra biscuit for the ducks. He found a fudgy, crumbling thing, shedding raisins all over his fingers. He started plucking chosen bits out of it. 

Crowley was ambushed by the thought of kidnappings, and retaliations. He imagined demon-shaped shadows coalesce in the greasy corners of back alleys as they snatched a well-dressed man out of the street – broken wings, hellfire held against tender skin. He forced himself to swallow the images back, and the bile that came with them. He made himself remember that neither Above nor Below folks were quite stupid enough to go after them so soon after their spectacular failure, and that all was well, and all was as it was before this whole Antichrist nonsense bit them on the arse. 

And that was great. That was more than _enough_. 

He also remembered his desperate night before the last day of life on Earth; the sudden burst of longing and grief so intermingled he couldn't tell them apart. He remembered his hands grabbing the phone, and typing away that truth – the essential one, the three words of it scorchingly hot under his fingertips – and fumbling for the _send_ button, and thinking, _well, well at least he'll know. At least he will finally bloody know, and tell me no, and then I could let myself be skewered by archangels during the Final Battle in peace._

Had he been drunken when writing down all that giant heap of sentimental rubbish? Sadly, not enough to justify it. 

Luckily not enough to _send_ it, either. 

A couple of ducks quacked excitedly at the smithereens of biscuit he was dropping in the water. They gobbled them up, foregoing munching, withered raisin and all. 

_Greedy buggers,_ Crowley mused, not unkindly. _A_ lways wanting more than they had. 

_Relatable, that._

A flicker made Crowley’s head snap up, pulling him out of his gloomy musings with an almost audible _plop_. It wasn’t exactly a flicker of light and not exactly a flutter of movement, but it felt like both. It was warm, and strong enough to feel touchable. It skimmed his nape like a phantom hand, and it was as familiar as the pattern of the coils of the snake inked on his temple. 

It was the angel, of course. 

Aziraphale was coming up the path – in the dignified little trot that was the closes thing to actual running Crowley had ever seen him do. He was waving wildly over the heads of a couple of Japanese tourists strolling in the opposite direction. 

Crowley realized he was still hunched over as if swapping state secrets with the pond ducks, and leaned back against the bench in an approximation of a slouch; gaze pinned on the angel as he moved closer. If he closed his eyes now, he knew he’d still see the outline of him against his eyelids, etched in light like a sunblaze. 

_Should really cut on the sugar, Crowley. You’ll turn into a heap of gummy worms if you go on like this._

Aziraphale skidded to a halt in front of the bench. He plopped himself down at his side, gulping out words between ragged breaths. 

“Awfully – sorry – tardiness – won’t happen – again –“ 

In all his brooding and vivid review of possible murder scenarios, Crowley had found the time to come up with half a dozen witty responses to the angel’s inevitable apologies – his favorites being, _Oh, so you weren’t murdered by a mob of crazed bookworms hellbent on revenge for all the Jane Austen’s first editions you never sold them after all_ , and, _You’re so late you nearly – nearly – made me regret – nearly – good ol’ Fourteenth Century and its let’s-count-out-hours-by-prayers foolishness_ _._

Now he took in Aziraphale’s flushed cheeks, the delicate peach of it in all that paleness, the hair tousled like ruffled feathers; the smile he was currently curving towards _him_ , himof all people in the world, freely given, ridiculously luminous. 

Every single word even vaguely associated with wittiness bled out of him like ink from a ballpoint doodle. 

“I – nah. Forget it, angel. Doesn’t matter,” Crowley heard himself say. And he meant it. Now that they were there, the food truck a pleasant walk away, the reality of Aziraphale hitting him on the skull like the lovely electrified sledgehammer it was, nothing else seemed to matter, or to matter quite as much. 

He cast a cursory glance at the ducks crowding around his grisly bits of biscuit, gorging themselves on scraps, and decided that yeah, he was probably more duck in his heart than he would care to admit. 

“No, Crowley,” Aziraphale said. “No, this time – this time it does matter.” 

Aziraphale’s voice caught him off guard. Not the voice itself, but the tone: serious, level, no hint of anything conversational anywhere in it. In a breathless fraction of a second, Crowley felt his spine unfurl and stiffen. His nervous system rose to the surface in a tangle of exposed nerves. When the angel’s white hand floated across the space between them and curled around his shoulder, they caught fire. All at the same time. 

Aziraphale took a breath: a longer one, a bracing one. Licked his lips. “I. I think you deserve to know why I’m so late to our appointment.” 

Dread slammed into Crowley’s chest. Dread, and panic. This wasn’t how they were – this wasn’t the way they were _supposed_ to be, the two of them. This was the unknown, a small kind of unknown, yes – but as far as Crowley is concerned, the paths to the unknown are generally slippery and twisted and more often than not treacherous enough to make you fall halfway down and tumble to the bottom in a crumple of broken bones. They were the last time. 

Suddenly, without warning, Crowley wanted out. He could see something loom on the horizon, the shadow of it making his neck prickle in animal alarm. It was the kind of feeling people – and every God-shaped creature, celestial beings not being that different from regular people in that regard – usually associate with mighty upheavals and momentous times, with the messiness of the world breaking apart and gruesomely reshaping itself into a new pattern. 

It’s called foreboding. It’s rarely painless for all parts involved. 

“Angel,” Crowley wheezed out, aiming for casual, failing miserably. “Hate to break it to you, but you’re not exactly new to being fashionably late. I reckon that thing,” – he points at Aziraphale’s velvety vest, the fob watch glinting softly as it rose and fell with his breathing – “has been broken for the seventy years. We have literally all the time in the world. There’s really no need to –“ 

“That’s – that’s the point, I suppose. One of them, anyway,” Aziraphale blurted out. His fingers were still pressed against Crowley’s shoulder, firmly, delicately; melting burning thumbprints into his skin all the way through his layers of thick leather and good cloth with the barest of touch. The angel’s hair caught a slant of sunlight, and Crowley was betrayed by the sudden marvel at how endearing it looked like this, so much like the halos humans loved painting in gold around the heads of their saints and their strange magnificent angels. 

Aziraphale leaned even closer, still solemn, still flushed. _So beautiful_ _, great Satan,_ Crowley thought, desperately. _So bloody beautiful._

“I was late because I – because I was trying to write you a letter, Crowley. An e-mail. In answer to yours.” 

_Oh,_ went Crowley, in his mind. 

And he started falling. 

There’s nothing graceful or quiet or romantic about a real fall, trust an expert on this. You lose balance; tip forward – feel the exact moment purchase is lost and nothing, absolutely nothing is left between you and the laws of gravity. Limbs flail. Air turns into thunder – deafening, roaring, loud enough for your bones to thrum with it. You reach out, desperately, stupidly, but there’s nothing to hold on but the thunder, the wind in your eyes, the blindness of fear. Sky smears into earth; up into down. You’re falling, and taking an awful long time doing it, and there’s nothing to think about but the crash that is bound to come, and if any part of you is going to survive it. 

As soon as he heard that blessed string of words – _email_ and _yours_ and _Aziraphale_ , all in the same sentence, all in the same space – Crowley felt absolutely positive the ground was splitting open like a ripe peach under their bench: trees torn off their roots, water and ducks dragged into the unseen chasm and the hellfire glinting at the bottom of it. He could feel the same swoop under his heart, the storm growling in his ears. He expected the Japanese tourists and the nostalgic spy pairs dotting the park to start screaming in panic any moment now. 

Except they didn’t. Except the ground stayed solid under his boot heels, ferociously green and British and squishy with fresh mud, and Aziraphale was still sitting too close and too serious, and the only thing falling was Crowley. 

At long last, his heart kicked itself back into motion. Gave one slow, reluctant beat. 

“What?” he croaked out. 

“The letter – the one I found on my computer.” Of all possible moments the angel chose that one to smile, as if he hadn’t just run Crowley through with the invisible sister of his flaming sword. “The one you sent me the day before… well, before all the trouble on Saturday.” 

_Trouble. Of course,_ Crowley’s brain provided, savagely. _Trouble._ _Meaning the day we got nearly annihilated on several different occasions and held the Antichrist’s hand as we faced the mightiest force of Evil the world has ever seen harmed with the bare dregs of a plan. The day I ran into the burning remains of your bookshop, of your life, and thought I had nothing else left of you._

_Trouble, of bloody_ fucking _course._

Crowley felt the tremor build in his shoulder, spreading from the point the Aziraphale’s hand was touching him all the way to every finger, every blood vessel, every inch of marrow nestled in his bones. It was him the one shaking. It was the angel. He didn’t know which would be worse. 

“It wasn’t supposed to be sent,” he said. “You weren’t supposed to read it.” 

“But I did,” Aziraphale replied. 

It was so soft it made Crowley want to cry. “It doesn’t mean a thing.” 

“I think we both know that’s not true.” 

“ _It is true_.” 

Crowley found himself on his feet without realizing it – shoulder achingly devoid of angel touch. Aziraphale’s hand was still hovering mid-air, brushing the space Crowley had been in. There was a pulse of something crossing the angel’s face, something tender and aching and scared, and Crowley dug his nails into his palms hard enough to feel the skin split just to keep himself from wondering what it could mean. “I was drunk out of my mind when I wrote that, angel – and terrified whole bloody Armageddon was on us and we have run out of options for good. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I can barely remember what I wrote in it.” 

_Liar._ The word rang out from under his ribs, chimed through the whole of him, like a glass struck by a tuning fork. _Liar, liar, liar._

When he told the angel he would never lie to him, Crowley had been perfectly sincere: because while he was a good enough liar to make him effective in his line of work, lying to the soft-spoken, fluffy man in Edwardian clothes sitting in front of him was as outrageously impossible as hiking his way back to Above. Which is why now he was keeping his eyes firmly on the tips of his shoes, and clenching his teeth until he felt them throb in their sockets, and backing away from Aziraphale, inch by stumbling inch. The dents of the angel’s fingertips still shimmered on his skin like a mark. The pressure of his eyes, of his _warmth –_ everywhere, and too close. 

To Crowley’s horror – no, not horror, more complicated than horror – Aziraphale rose to his feet, too. Crowley’s body lurched back, and his hands slammed against the railing of the duck pond, the metal humming with his momentum. 

"Crowley –" 

"I don't remember one word, angel" he said. _Shrieked_. "Not one word." 

A rustle of hushed voices drifted up to him. The Japanese couple were staring from under their wicker hats, still pretending to buy ice creams at the cart; Mr Benjamin, sitting stately behind said cart like he had for the past thirty years, discreetly lighted himself a fag, glaring through the bluish veil of his first drag at whatever nonsense two of his oldest clients were up to now. 

Crowley felt excruciatingly aware of how they should look from the outside: a young man in black scrambling away from a bench like a brain-fried junkie, pale as used tissues under his obnoxious black sunglasses; a middle-aged blond man reaching out for him with one well-manicured hand, the very image of harmless concern. But, oh, they didn’t know. They didn’t know what he could see – that he was a bundle of coal in black leather and Aziraphale was fire and light and air, the same things stars are made of. They didn’t know see how bright he shone, bright enough to hurt, and how every cell in Crowley's stupid damned body was aching to just look up and drink him in – heavenly fire and pain and light and _him_ , the whole of him, even if it left him blind. 

Crowley was still falling: gravity pulling at the center of his chest. He wasn’t sure whose gravity he was talking about. 

He curled his fingers around the railing. Aziraphale took a step forward. 

"You don't remember what you wrote, perhaps," the angel said, quiet and steady and absolutely inexorable. "But I do." 

Another step. Crowley closed his eyes – scrunching them behind his glasses. 

"Aziraphale," he begged. "Please." 

"'The fact is, angel: you have broken my heart something awful today,'" Aziraphale started quoting, softly, still moving. Crowley cursed his scholar's memory, his knack for good words. 

He recognized every single one. 

"'We fought. We said horrible things, and maybe you're right and tomorrow we'll all die in one enormous rain of fire, and I'll go down knowing the last thing I told you was that I wish you’ll enjoy your Doomsday and that I've fought for six thousand years on a side that was never really there. 

it’s unfair. It hurts more than any self-respecting demon would deem tasteful. It's just enough of a bad joke to be the kind of stunt She pulls on people.'" 

Aziraphale moved closer. In the darkness behind Crowley’s eyelids, in the amplifying emptiness of it, the angel felt close enough Crowley hear the hesitation as he paused, a flutter in the warmth that shrouded him like a second skin. It sounded as if something in those words was making him tremble. 

"'That said,'" Aziraphale went on, and Satan, and God, Crowley remembered every word of that, too. “'I want you to know, angel, that I love you.’" 

Crowley was shaking so hard he could barely keep himself on his feet – the railing the only thing breaking the fall. He had long stopped breathing. He was paper, and Aziraphale was a struck match, hovering one inch from burning him through. 

"'I want you know that I have loved you since we were as new and shiny and foolish as the world, and we stood on the edge of the garden under the first rain of creation.'" 

Crowley could hear it clearly, now: the crack running through the angel's voice, like the lovely golden veins gluing together Japanese broken china. 

It made him open his eyes. 

"I have never known you to be cruel, angel," he rasped, still shaking, still burning. 

Aziraphale flinched like he had just slapped him – and even now the remorse was immediate, overwhelming. Still, the angel didn’t pull back. Instead, he closed the distance between them for good, one hand closing around the railing behind Crowley, head tipped back to meet his eyes. 

Slowly, giving him all the time to push him back and move away, his free hand rose to Crowley's cheek, hooked a finger around the stem of his glasses, pulled. 

Crowley didn’t move. The pond, the ogling tourists, their lunch and the park and the whole world, everything crafted by Her clever hands but the creature in front of him – it all bled into nothingness. There was nothing but Aziraphale’s scent trapped in his clothes – soap and sugar and the clean smell of air after a summer storm – the slight scrape of plastic against his skin as the angel slid the sunglasses off his nose. Crowley blinked naked eyes, yellow and wide and wet. 

"Is it true, Crowley?" Aziraphale asked. He could feel the words vibrate in his chest, travel across the tight space between their bodies. 

Crowley felt a bubble of hysterical laughter crawl up his throat. He made a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a death rattle. 

"Satan, angel," he croaked out, "you really are the dumbest brilliant person I've ever met." 

Aziraphale had the gall to look shocked. He had the gall to gape, a little _oh_ caught between his lips, and to press closer to him. 

He dared, the oblivious idiot, the tormenting match consuming him paper scrap by paper scrap, to look as if Crowley, too, were holding a struck match close to his heart. 

"You never said anything," Aziraphale said, a bit breathless. 

Here, with his chin tilted slightly upwards, he was practically talking against Crowley's throat, mouth hovering somewhere by his jaw. Crowley remembered with a jolt the inch he had on the angel; how they were the perfect bloody height for him to pull him to his chest and weave a hand into his hair. He curled his hands tighter around the metal railing, feeling the bolts push into his skin. 

He wouldn’t let himself hope. Not now, not yet. There was unraveling and upheaval in this, in the angel breathing against him, and foreboding, and the world breaking itself and putting itself back together in a different shape, and none of it ever turns out well for the ones like him. 

He swallowed. Saying it felt like plucking each word out of his heart – thread coming off with them. 

"You told me I ran too fast," he said. The angel's lips were so close he can shape the words against them. "So I swore I wouldn’t run ever again, angel. And I won’t. I promise." 

There was a beat of silence; it swelled into infinity under Crowley's skin. Ah, he'd already been here: the last stretch of a fall, the tumbling so fast and weightless it felt almost like flying. The shock of the ground coming into sight. The impact. 

He stared at his angel, and wondered about the odds of getting up after that particular fall. 

Then several things happened at the same time. Aziraphale's hand was moving again, and this time it was sinking in Crowley's hair – still holding tight on his glasses, cupping the back of his head with that the unexpected strength of his. There was a pressure to the neck, a loss of balance, a _woosh_ of displaced air as Crowley pitched forward. The angel's body, wrapping itself around his, catching him, not letting go. 

"I'll do the running, then," Aziraphale sighed, on Crowley's skin, on his lips, and suddenly there was no distance between them at all. 

Crowley tasted softness, and warmth; a sweetness that tore a ragged thing of a sound out of his throat, liquorous with time. It felt like swallowing a galaxy, letting it blink stars in your rib cage. It feels like kissing lightning, and letting it stop your heart, and jump-start it back into life. 

Crowley's hands unhooked themselves from the railing. They fluttered towards Aziraphale – sank into his curls, losing purchase, finding it again. _Aziraphale_. The name pulsed out of him in waves. He wasn’t sure if he was saying it, or if it was just the rushing blood in his veins and the air between them, the echo of all the times he called it in his mind. He said it again. _Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale._

The angel sighed into his mouth. He arched in his arms. Crowley was holding himself together with spit and duct tape, and that was nearly enough to shatter him into pieces. _Nearly_. He reached out for it all, took it all, and when they pulled back he found himself still tangled in Aziraphale’s embrace, neither of them quite letting go. 

The angel looked up at him. He was breathing hard, lips bruised pink, hands in Crowley's hair. It made Crowley think of deliciously vintage words like _rav_ _ished_ or _disheveled_. A round of ragged applause rose from the ice cream cart, the Japanese couple smiling awkwardly under their hats, Mr Benjamin muttering around his cigarette. 

"I suppose I really should check my email more often," muttered Aziraphale. It was such a genuinely _Aziraphale_ thing to say that, despite the jelly quality of his legs, Crowley found himself laughing. He was happy. He was drunk. He was going to faint and topple straight into the pond. Still, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to reach out to tug on a blond curl, and say: 

"Told you, angel." 

Somewhere at their back, the ducks quacked their approval. 


End file.
